In various industries, commissions are known to be distributed from one side to another side, where such sides contain complementary parties participating in various transactions. Technical problems in allocating commissions include lack of accuracy, delay, and lack of data integrity. Known computer systems for allocating commissions do not efficiently associate allocation data to underlying data concerning the transactions (or other considerations) that form the basis for the allocation in a way that preserves accuracy and data integrity. Such systems are also susceptible to delay, in that they may not be configured to conduct efficient data communications over a network and may require human intervention. Further, such system can often suffer from encroachment of non-deterministic data, whether provided by humans or other sources, which cannot be mapped to underlying data concerning the transactions (or other considerations).
While commissions are typically due from a buyer to a seller in response to a sale of goods, in some cases there will be multiple sellers from which the goods could have been purchased (at the same price, same terms, etc). In such cases, the selection by the buyer of which seller to purchase from can be made based upon a variety of other criteria. For example in the financial area, pre-sales support such as ongoing access to good research information, etc. (i.e., value added services) can all be considered by a buyer as valuable services and can be used in selecting one seller from among many to complete a transaction and thereby allowing the seller to earn commission.
However, as such value added services can occur a significant period of time before a sales transaction completes, it is possible that the buyer forgets or undervalues these value added services provided by a seller and completes the transaction with a seller that did not provide the value added services. It is also possible that, for a variety of reasons, a buyer may decide to deal with a different seller than a seller who provided value added services. Finally, in the financial industry, to prevent potentially improper transactions regulators are often interested in the criteria used by a buyer in selecting a particular seller and it may be difficult for a buyer to subsequently justify why a transaction was closed with a particular seller.
A variety of existing systems have been employed for attempting to track the use of and value of such value added services to buyers. In perhaps the most widely used system in the financial markets, buyers vote, at regular intervals, on the value of the value added services provided to them during the relevant period by each seller with which they interact. The number of votes a seller receives can be used by a buyer to weight future allocations of purchase transactions between sellers. For example, at the end of a calendar quarter seller A may receive thirty percent of the votes from a buyer, while seller B receives fifty percent and seller C receives twenty percent. In such an example, the buyer may decide that, next quarter, it will direct fifty percent of its purchases through seller B, thirty percent through seller A and twenty percent through seller C.
Such a voting system, in theory, tracks value added services, as well as potentially other factors and such systems are common in the financial industry, where buy-side parties vote quarterly to allocate commissions to sell-side parties.
As mentioned above, one concern with such a system, and others, is that many of the factors that influence commission voting are not available for scrutiny by industry regulators, the public, and even the parties themselves. Industry regulators have an interest in making sure that commission allocation is transparent, deterministic, or otherwise quantifiable. The public may wish to understand how an industry operates so that it can be properly regulated and so that retail aspects of the industry are fully understood. Further, a party that does not receive an expected commission has an interest in understanding the rationale, so that the party may modify their operations to bring greater efficiency to the industry. Further, in some circumstances a party which determines that they are providing the value added services to a buyer who is paying corresponding commissions to other sellers (either intentionally or by accident) can approach the buyer and discuss the situation to attempt to remedy it.
Hence, conventional commission allocation schemes are susceptible to misuse, lack transparency, and can be inaccurate and inefficient. The state of the art lacks a system that can easily and automatically allocate commissions based on quantifiable or knowable factors in a transparent, accurate, and efficient manner.